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CASE STUDY
Asset Transition – IT and Information Management
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Preparation stage
When approaching a transition project time is often tight, and your organisation may not have bid for such work. There may also be incomplete information about the work, so you will need to be flexible and picking the right partner really helps.
Sword has draft client scopes to help accelerate your project and can rapidly produce proposals to meet your needs.
Here are some points you can work on prior to the asset acquisition being completed and announced.
- What are the key business goals? Often these focus on operational continuity, minimising change, using standard applications, and reducing risk
- What is the likely deal date, transition start date and expected go-live? Who will Operate?
- What assets, topsides, FPSOs, subsea, etc. Are they manned or unmanned?
- Consider a single partner to perform the transition for buyer and seller, it improves communication, can share resources, simplify information transfer, and make things more efficient – saving time and money
- Will people be transferring, or more reliant on new hires? Potential loss of knowledge
- What systems are being used and how much information / data is stored? Consider non-digital content, such as archive boxes and magnetic tapes? Not all of it may transfer
- Do you need a new office, or new systems to house the teams and the data?
- Procurement strategy; multiple tenders for multiple systems, single-source, direct buying or via your transition partner?
- Check on the rules and regulations that will have a bearing, such as information governance, security, laws, and regulatory reporting
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The transition and beyond
Once a project scope has been outlined and you are talking with a specialist partner such as Sword, what will transition look like?
- Rapid mobilisation of the project team, information gathering and detailed planning. This first phase of the project typically takes a couple of weeks
- Implementation – very dependent on scale and scope, but 3-9 months is typical. Includes the three main steps of develop & deploy, transition content & closeout. The implementation can be split into workstreams; project management, applications, networks & telecoms, servers & clients, and information management
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Operational support
- Beyond transition – what happens after the closeout? Once you are live on your new assets the systems need to be supported. Sword can provide on-going managed services to run things like helpdesk, application support and network services. This could also be done in-house or a mix to give you just what you need
- Enhancements – Now that you have a stable operating environment you can introduce improvements to suit the future way your organisation wishes to work. We can help with ad-hoc projects, a wider programme of change and the associated procurement, system development and business process work
PHASE
Project Initiation
Planning (pre TOO)
Transfer Of Ownership (TOO)
Post TOO
ACTIVITIES
- Agree post TOO service from seller
- Partner connectivity
- Information access
- Produce Project Initiation Document (PID)
- Applications strategy
- infrastructure strategy
- IM strategy
- Execution of applications, infrastructure and IM strategies
- Steady state support
- Legacy system
- Service improvement programme
- Ongoing IM plan
DELIVERABLES
Project Initiation Document
IT transition plan
Asset transfer
Stable, fully supported IT environment
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How to reduce risks
Our experience and specialist knowledge of the oil & gas sector helps reduce risk during transitions and for on-going services. The key risk areas for transition can be readily mitigated.
- Safety – We are experts in handling safety critical information in upstream oil & gas. We ensure your people and partners have the right work instructions, systems and up to date information to run operations safely
- Production – The operational go-live is crucial and we are used to running engineering and subsurface information management to support this. There may be shutdowns and turnarounds planned, we help speed those up and make them more efficient. We can also help with optimisation of spares, maintenance and logistics, equipment performance and other measures to maintain or increase production
- Complexity – For transition it is important to keep things simple. Enhancements can be incorporated later based on business cases. The clear goal is a clean and timely project so that there is no impact to your operational plans
- Knowledge – New assets usually come with new people and transfers of personnel, so we focus on making their life easier. They need to know how to find information to support their work and be able to rely on it. We help by classifying key content, dealing with security, and understanding the roles they perform and what they need
- Time – transitions always have many timetable pressures, including influences from your business partners, joint-ventures, the regulator, and others. Mitigate this by using a company who has done this many times, with a wide range of personnel ready to start fast and adapt as things change
- Cost – Smart buying reduces cost, use our vendor knowledge of scopes and prices to simplify buying and let us negotiate better pricing for you. Use our flexible team to get the skills you need when you need them, supplementing your own capabilities. When meeting conflicts of price and project goals we can help you get the best outcome, balancing system cost versus deployment time and ensuring fit for purpose systems
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About Sword
Sword UK are focused on solving key business challenges within organisations, centred around developing the management of day to day IT, helping to optimise organisational infrastructure to allow customers to focus on high value activity. Sword UK support customers to succeed in their digital journey by introducing and implementing technology as an enabler not an inhibitor.
Sword
Johnstone House,
52 – 54 Rose Street, Aberdeen, AB10 1UD
Tel: +44 (0)1224 506 110
www.sworditsolutions.com
